


The New Camelot: How to Construct a Familial Legacy Inside the Beltway

by arbitrarily



Category: BrainDead (TV)
Genre: Body Horror, Dubious Consent, F/M, Fuck Or Die, Infidelity, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-08 20:18:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7771726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The list of ways space bugs have ruined Laurel’s life has gotten far too complicated. </p>
<p>Or, the bugs find Luke. Luckily*, so does Laurel.</p>
<p>(*The positive or negative nature of said luck is subject to debate).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The New Camelot: How to Construct a Familial Legacy Inside the Beltway

**Author's Note:**

> ... I'm sorry. Apparently my brain couldn't let this rest. Let's blame space bugs. 
> 
> This takes place somewhere between episodes 1x9 and 1x10; general spoilers apply.

 

 

A whimper or a bang, or both. Nonsensically – or perfectly sensibly – that’s the single thought looping through Laurel’s – mercifully uninfected – mind. 

Laurel is used to worrying about the future of the world. Albeit, it’s previously been packaged in vague, ambiguously-defined buzzwords. Y2K. Global warming. Weapons of mass-destruction. Colony collapse disorder. International terrorism, religious fundamentalism, Donald Trump. 

Space bugs.

It’s odd, how having something so impossibly bizarrely specific to fixate on as the source of potential end makes said annihilation feel almost manageable. Or, at least, that felt true at first. 

Now, well. Well, there has to be something worse than this, though Laurel is having a hard time thinking of examples. Exploding heads. Multiple exploding heads. Red Wheatus steering the metaphorical ship that is America right into the waiting equally metaphorical iceberg of doom. Red Wheatus, generally. International terrorism, religious fundamentalism, Donald Trump. 

Luke – standing there in front of her, in his office, a head full of space bugs.

 

 

 

 

** 22 MINUTES EARLIER **

Laurel’s phone rings. Balanced precariously on the lip of the sink, it buzzes and rattles against the porcelain. It’s late; she is brushing her teeth, getting ready for bed. She’s tired in a way that’s come to define her days and nights since she decided to stay in the district. 

Laurel glances down, bites down on the head of the brush, grinding it down between her molars. It’s Luke.The phone continues to ring, Laurel caught in an extended moment of indecision that lasts until her voicemail picks up and the phone goes silent. She resumes her brushing, a misguided violence against her own teeth. 

The phone starts to buzz again.  LUKE. 

“What?” she spits into the sink. “I thought we weren’t talking.”

A long pause stretches and the only thing she can hear on his end is his heavy breathing. And then, her name: “Laurel?” She reaches to turn the faucet off, her hand moving independent of her mind, fixated instead on the fear she can hear buried in her name.

“Luke?”

The silence returns; once he breaks it, she’ll wish they could go back, rewind to the quiet. She’s been feeling that a lot lately, this desire to go back to a time when she didn’t know anything. Where her biggest concerns were a blown budget and where in the world she might place herself far enough outside their father’s sphere of influence. But she’s also practical – she takes what she’s given, and she moves forward. That might be the Healy family birthright: making near lethal limoncello out of lemons. 

“I can feel them,” Luke says, out of breath. “In my head,” he says. Laurel feels dizzy, as if dropped from a great height. “I can feel _them_.” His breathing ratchets up that much more, practically panting. Laurel sucks in her own harsh breath, this tremendous tide of panic threatening to pull her under. 

“You’re going to be fine,” Laurel says, and that can’t be a lie if she believes it too, right? She scrambles around her apartment, pulls on an old pair of sweats one-handed, repeating herself to Luke as he does little more than breathe harshly in her ear. “You’re going to be fine,” she says, again, jamming the key into her apartment door, locking it behind her. She almost feels in control, calm even. He’s going to be fine. They can fix this. 

“Start drinking,” she says, trying to order an Uber as she talks to him on speaker. Why does DC cab service have to be so bad? She really does hate it here. 

“Talk to me,” she says when she crawls into the backseat of the car that pulls up. “No, wait. Don’t. Don’t talk. Don’t think.” She can’t stop picturing exploding heads, that daily low level terror she’s been living with like the female lead in an old-school Polanski film that has now escalated to full-blown fear. Rosemary with the devil baby, that’s her. 

“Start drinking,” she says again. “Alcohol, lots of alcohol. Stop thinking. Put on some music. Porn!” she shouts, and the Uber driver gives her a look in the rearview mirror. “Watch porn!”

“I don’t – ”

“Right brain, we have to trigger the right brain. Don’t worry about it, just do it. You have to trust me on this and you have to go watch some porn, okay?”

He doesn’t say anything, which she’s choosing to take as a sign of obedience.

“I’m on my way. You’re going to be fine.”

He has to be. She has already lost their father – she’s not going to lose Luke, too. She won’t allow it. He’s going to be fine.

 

 

 

 

They had fought earlier that day. Nothing new on that front: growing up they split their time evenly as both rivals and allies. 

That morning, she was slouched low in a chair in his office. That morning, Luke was talking to her about something their father had said about a potential Hillary administration, the potential cabinet position he could jockey for, whatever. Politics, she has discovered, is one giant meteorological-esque crapshoot of prospective personal futures while ignoring the present. Despite working for him long enough, Laurel had never taught herself how to fully listen to anything Luke says.

“I wouldn’t listen to a word Dad says,” Laurel interrupted.

She wasn’t expecting the assessing look Luke fixed her with. Like he had a card up his sleeve she wasn’t going to like. “Funny. That’s exactly what he said about you.” He leaned back in his chair, his fingers steepled. “He came by earlier. Mentioned you, how he thinks your judgment’s been compromised, ever since you started seeing Red’s Chief of Staff. I told him he was being silly, and then he said you came to him ranting and raving. About bugs.” He said the word _bugs_ like any other four-letter word.

She didn’t say anything. Not at first. Luke arched an eyebrow, as if to say, _well?_

“Luke.” She had to tell him. Fuck. She had to tell him. “He’s one of them.”

His face dropped down into a frown, his turn to be met with the unexpected. “One of who?”

“Whom. Sorry.” She swallowed. “Them,” she said, waving her arms, finding this incredibly difficult to explain. Well, more incredibly difficult than she might have thought explaining some doomsday intergalactic bug plot swarming the city like biblical locusts. “He’s not Dad anymore. His brain,” she sighed.

“Oh my god. For fuck’s sake, you really are still on about those fucking bugs. Ringworms, or whatever.”

“Screwworms. And they’re not that. They’re … You wouldn’t believe me even if I said it.”

“Try me,” he said drily. 

She arched an eyebrow. _You asked for it._ “They’re not from here.”

He cocked his head, leaned forward, like maybe this was something he could work with. “Russia?” he asked.

She shrugged. “In a roundabout way, but no.” She took a deep breath. “That meteor? Remember that? Before the shutdown, what Dr. Daudier was working on, before he … died?” Luke didn’t say anything but his expression read as increasingly skeptical and annoyed. “They’re from,” and she paused, figured he could fill in the blanks.

“Let me get this straight. You're saying Dad is not Dad anymore because he has bugs from a meteor from outer space inside his head.”

“They’ve eaten his brain. At least half of it. And he’s not the only one. Red? Scarlett? Ella? Friends of mine, too, and – ”

“Laurel, stop.” His voice was too sharp. He didn’t believe her; she couldn’t really blame him, except for how she could. She needed him to believe her. “Do your hear yourself?”

“Of course I hear myself. But, you have to listen to me, Luke.” She stood up.

“Laurel, I told you. No. Absolutely not. We are not having now or any other time any bug-related conversations.”

“They were going to torture me,” she snapped. “And you know why?”

“Islamaphobia and the ambulance driver?”

“No – because they know I know!”

“They know you know bugs have eaten people’s brains and made them explode?”

“Not all the brains explode. Stacie, my friend, or she was my friend, now she’s – I don’t know what she is. But her head is empty, completely empty.”

“Metaphorically?”

“Literally.”

“And yours? Is scrambled. You know how insane you sound, sis?”

“Believe me, I am well-aware.” She swallowed. She had to make him understand. “They have Dad.”

“Jesus Christ.” He was standing now too, rubbing at the back of his neck, his ire concentrated and aimed at her and not the situation.

“His Parkinson’s is gone. He’s gone.”

“I had lunch with him today.”

“You did but you didn’t.”

“Stop it. You’re not funny.”

“I know I’m not!”

“What is this? Some sort of stress-induced psychosis? Are you that unhappy being here you had to go and start inventing this _X-Files_ bullshit with your little Scooby Doo crew?”

“I’m trying to protect you. I am trying to get you to help me.”

“I seem to recall last time I tried helping you I wound up the laughingstock on the Senate floor.”

“Like you need my help for that,” she snapped without meaning to. So easy just to default to the ugly way they used to fight growing up, how well they both could read the minefield of the other’s insecurities. He fixed her with a hard glare.

“Why are you even here, Laurel.” It wasn’t a question; the inflection was absent. “It’s clearly not for me. What are you doing here.”

“Money,” she said, cold as possible. 

That only made Luke grin, an ugly grin, the kind of grin she imagined he brought out as a weapon in his backroom deals, when there was someone to cow and intimidate. It left her furious to think he thought she was one of those people. 

“Look at you,” he said. “As mercenary as the rest of us.”

“Fuck you.”

Unexpected, as far as prophetic statements go.

 

 

 

 

But now – Luke, his office, bugs.

She storms into his office, finds Luke, pacing. He’s kind of red in the face and a little sweaty, but she doesn’t think he looks like he’s on the precipice of a brain explosion, or whatever the second option is where the bugs keep you alive, but theirs. 

His relief is palpable when he looks at her. 

“Hey, Luke.” The hesitation in her voice matches her careful steps towards him.

“You were right. There, I said it. I said it, let’s move on, Jesus fucking Christ, I can feel them. In my head. I can feel them.” His voice cracks and Laurel can feel that same fear banking inside of her. It’s nowhere near as gratifying as she thought that would be, Luke telling her she was right. 

“Okay, there’s gonna be plenty of time for me to gloat later, because you, you’re gonna be fine, and we’ll have an entire future for me to rub just how right I was in your totally fine and a-ok face.” She smiles but it feels wrong, as plasticky and fake-cheery as everything she just said.

“Laurel.” His teeth are gritted, jaw clenched. She had called both Gustav and Rochelle on the way over, put Luke on a brief hold. Neither had answered, which is alarming for a whole other host of reasons she lacks the headspace to consider. “Tell me how to get them out. Tell me – ”

She eyes his desk, the open laptop with the ambient porny moans (so at least he listened to her on that front) and the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle he’s downed a considerable amount of. She plops down the bottle of whiskey she brought with her. She’s about to start explaining, her mouth open and everything, Luke looking at her expectantly, but she shakes her head. “Nope. We’re not thinking. Thinking and explaining is for when we’re bug-free.” She shoves the bottle forward, points at the laptop. “Drink. Porn. That’s what we’re – you’re going to do.”

She closes the blinds while he drinks, sits down in his desk chair, his eyes unfocused as they fix on the laptop screen. Christ, porn on his government-issued laptop; that’ll be an issue for another day – especially if Ella catches wind of it: the womanizer Senator with a nasty porn habit, with an emphasis on anal play, if what little Laurel can see of the screen is telling. Why does she have to know these things about her brother; Washington D.C. and its mini-invaders are ruining her life. 

She catches the questioning look he shoots her over the top of his laptop. He has to stop second-guessing her at every turn or this is never going to work. 

“You have to keep your brain,” she stumbles over the words, trying to remember what Gustav and Rochelle had told her, “you have to, uh, light up the pleasure centers?”

He bites off a cruel bark of laughter. 

“Debauchery, that’s how you get the bugs out. Which you excel at, so this should be a cakewalk.” 

Luke inclines his head towards the laptop, full glass held up. “This isn’t debauchery; this is Tuesday night.”

She frowns. She was afraid of that.

“Keep drinking,” she snaps.

“Ugh,” Luke says, swipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “If I keep drinking,” he hiccups, “I’m gonna,” and he trails off. His frown deepens and he winces, drops his head into his hands.

“You want me debauched? Who am I supposed to fuck?” she hears him ask, the question muffled behind his hands.

“Don’t worry about that, no thinking, don't think about that, you’re gonna go back to,” she waves at his laptop, “and I’m gonna find you. A lady.”

“Laurel.” The fear is back in his voice.

She snatches up his phone. “It’s fine.”

 

 

 

 

It’s not fine. 

Before she stepped out of her office, she had paused in the doorway. Her hand was sweaty around his phone and she shifted her weight when he glanced over at her. “It would help, probably,” she said, bit the inside of her cheek, “if, you know. You got yourself off. I’ll be outside.”

That’s gotta easily rank as the strangest, creepiest, most awful thing she’s said to not just Luke but, contextually, anyone ever probably. 

Laurel paces outside his office, thumbing through his phone. She calls woman after woman, rarely if ever able to get a word in edge-wise before she’s met with a string of either the profane, the baffling, or both: Jeanne: “My husband left me because of you, you piece of shit”; Anne-Marie: “Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior, Luke? Have you?”; Jessica: “Fuck. You.”

It’s like getting a crash course in her brother’s sex life that, frankly, she already knew too much about. It only contributes to that distinct discomfort creeping over her, managing to pierce the high-level fear already racing through her thinking of Luke, jacking off, on her command. 

She’s just been hung up on by a woman named Shari (“You have a lot of goddamn nerve calling me again, Luke Healy. Who do you think I am? Who do you think you are? Go fuck yourself.”) when she hears a bunch of crashing in his office. She rushes in, and –

so, his pants are undone. She can start with that. His cock is half-hard, and that’s not really something she ever thought she’d have to witness where Luke is concerned: his cock and the state of it. She is decidedly not looking at it. It’s kinda like when she was in high school and he was home for the summer and she found him passed out naked in the bathtub. Actually, this isn’t like that at all; that had been funny. This is a nightmare.

He’s clumsy, his pants tangled around his legs, face screwed up in pain, and she sort of vaguely remembers that part of all this – crashing through her apartment, Gustav on the phone. Gareth. She sang at him? It’s better not to remember that night, which she’s pretty sure will wind up being the case with this one, too. 

Luke has knocked the bulk of the contents off his desk (wisely avoiding the bottle of Pappy and the laptop, so someone’s still home upstairs) to the floor.

“So this isn’t good,” she says quietly.

Luke doesn’t hear her. He’s muttering to himself, seemingly unaware she came back into the office. 

She takes a deep breath. Apparently, thinking is required to a certain degree when it comes to jerking off. Apparently it either a) requires too much brainpower for Luke, or b) it’s not enough stimulation to overpower brain-eating bugs from outer space hell-bent on overthrowing the government and achieving world domination. That’s gotta be the long game, right? Which has to mean anything she does to save her brother and his senatorial brain is essentially her saving the world. Right?

Right, she tells herself. Right. She looks over at him quickly; he’s pulled his pants back up and he’s looking at her now with this stupidly lost and earnest expression. So she’s going to have to save the world. The resolve hardens inside of her. They’re wasting time. She’s wasting time. She glares at his silent phone in her hand.

“Okay.” She exhales. She drops his phone on his desk. “Sit down,” she hears herself say, her heart hammering. She can’t do this; she has to do this. She approaches him once he sits. She takes another deep breath as she lowers herself to her knees next to his chair, Luke watching her warily the entire way, his pulse leaping in his neck. 

“Take off your pants,” she says, quiet, near inaudible, but Luke’s eyes bug out all the same.

“What?”

“You heard me.” She’s trying real hard to be stern and stoic but her hands are shaking at her sides. “You know, you really should be nicer to the women you cheat on your wife with.”

“Call Scarlett then, I can’t let you – ”

“I can’t, she’s one of them.”

He meets her eye and she’s trying so hard to be brave and pretending so hard that this is a completely acceptable thing for the both of them to be doing.

“I’m all you have,” she clears her throat, tries to think of a worse thing she’s ever said, comes up blank. Historical precedent is really failing her here. “I’ll do it.” She didn’t think it was possible for his eyes to widen that much more, but, well, here they are. 

“Oh my god, you don’t have to do this,” he says, but he’s lifting his hips anyway, dragging his pants and his boxers down his thighs, and, okay, this is happening. She doesn’t look away this time. Despite his crumbling resistance, his dick is interested – twitches under her gaze, hardening, his thighs tensing.

“We’re just gonna … lie back,” she says, like one of those self-help meditation phone apps, unsure which of them she’s trying to keep calm. Probably both. “And think of Lincoln. Democracy? The free world? A 2024 presidential bid?”

Luke honest-to-God groans at that, lets it drop into a low near-hysterical laugh. Laurel rolls her eyes – _predictable_ – but it distracts enough from the first tentative touch of her hand against his dick. He’s heavier, thicker, against her palm than – what? she expected? 

“No, no, Laurel. You don’t have to do this.” He says it when she tightens her fist around him, when she can feel him swelling in her grip, his eyes wild.

Laurel’s voice is quiet when she says: “I want to.” And does she mean that? No, what she means is she wants to save him. What she means is she’ll do anything.

But Luke says, “Jesus fucking Christ,” all the same, scrubs a hand over his face. His cock is hot in her hand, heat spreads in her gut; what’s the difference. A lot of politics is just a matter of choosing the right words to hide the real meaning. 

Laurel tightens her grip experimentally, drags her hand up, thumb rubbing over the head of his cock. He makes a noise like a wounded animal. The only place they touch is her hand on his cock; she thinks maybe touching him as little as possible is the most sensible approach to – what? Jacking your own brother off? That if she keeps this as clinical as possible there’s a road back from this? She has to keep reminding herself that there is nothing she wouldn’t do for Luke. She wonders if the same is true for him, then feels guilty for the thought. But then, what doesn’t feel guilty about right now?

Her tentative horror gives way as she moves her hand faster. She has to pause to spit in her hand, but he’s hard now, both of them deliberately not looking at each other (or he’s deliberately not looking at her; she keeps sneaking glances out of the corner of her eye to make sure he’s not looking at her, as much intimacy between them as a glory hole or massage parlor – a mistake she recognizes even now, the thought dim and crowded out by everything else she is trying to ignore: distancing themselves from each other is just another form of thought). 

Luke is breathing hard, almost as loud as the sound of her hand working him. He shifts his hips every now and again, but this is … not good. Her wrist is starting to ache; she can’t remember the last time she gave a guy a straight-up handjob as the main event. 

“This must be what vets feel like when they have to jerk-off horses.”

Luke snorts into his glass, some of the booze sloshing over his hand, rolling down his wrist. That’s a safe thing to watch so she does. But he shudders then, Laurel can see it as much as feel it, hear it – the jagged sigh that cuts behind his teeth.

“If that’s a favorable comparison, I accept the compliment. Ow,” he holds his free hand up to his head. 

“Stop trying to be clever. You’ll make your head explode.” She says it dry and mean, like she doesn’t have his dick in her hand. She doesn’t have his dick in her hand, that’s what she needs to keep telling herself. That might be a way she can live with this.

She reaches and takes the glass from his hand, makes a quick remark about how he can’t drink too much – “I don’t understand the rules here,” he says, kinda breathless. She takes a long swallow from the glass and hisses, prays it’ll go straight to her head. She can feel the heat of it coursing through her, wants to believe it’s the booze and not … this. Him.

“Whiskey dick is really not going to help us right now.”

He slurs, just a little, “It’s not the booze.” His lips smack as he swallows. “I’m not fourteen. Handjobs haven’t been exciting in going on three decades. No offense.”

Laurel could almost laugh: even here, Luke's still Luke – smug enough to look a gift horse in the mouth. “I’d suggest you try that math again, but, well, kablooey.”

“I’m not gonna come from doing math,” and he sounds a little like he could laugh, but his hands are curling white-knuckled into the arms of his chair and there’s that tic at the corner of his jaw and this isn’t working. This isn’t going to work. This isn’t going to work. Like every other disastrous armed conflict when the first wave fails: it leads to escalation. 

“I was referring to the above-the-neck head,” she says, distracted, her voice distant. Because oh god, is she really going to do this. In for a penny in for a pound, or however and whatever that expression is.

Laurel lifts her eyes to him – it’s a punch to the gut to find him already watching her. She had expected that drunken, glassy-eyed stare, but it’s worse than that: dark, focused gaze, mouth parted open. He doesn’t look away when she looks at him. Neither says anything, but she stops moving her hand, his body as tense and coiled as her own feels. 

It’s another decision to be made that she knows deep down she already made. She drags her hand down to the base of his cock, squeezes once. Luke swallows hard, and this is wrong this is wrong this is so wrong –

“Is this okay?” she asks, her voice lower than she expected. She’s already leaning forward, he has to be able to feel her breath on his cock (why is she breathing so hard?). His nod is small, but it’s there – the muscle jumping at the corner of his jaw. 

She averts her eyes and opens her mouth.

 

 

  

 

He tastes like any other guy. 

Laurel has shut her brain off. The taste of him, the feel of him against her tongue, head bumping the roof of her mouth, fucking down her throat, the first pull of his fingers through her hair – all inconsequential. It doesn’t matter. The spit dribbling down her chin – doesn’t matter. That he’s big enough to make her jaw ache, that she’s getting that he likes his fucking rough or maybe he just likes fucking her rough or – it doesn’t matter. Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown. It’s Washington, D.C. It’s space bugs. It’s her on her knees for her brother Senator Luke Healy in the basement of the Russell Office Building.

It’s her choking on his dick. “Sorry,” he says, the word smudging out in a gasp and a moan, thrusting again too hard into her mouth. He says sorry but he does it again, tugging at her hair, like he’s trying to pull her off of him while continuing to thrust too deep down her throat. She gags, can feel the wet pulse between her own legs, and what the fuck is wrong with her. Luke’s too aggressive though, needing more harder and faster than her mouth can give, bucking his hips, his hand fisted too tight in her hair; she chokes again, her eyes watering, and this … isn’t going to work either. She can’t keep up with him like this.

She pulls back from him; the string of her saliva connected from her swollen mouth to the head of his dick is the most obscene thing she’s ever seen.

Laurel stands up. The road to hell and good intentions, Jesus. She’s moving fast now. She peels her sweats and her underwear down her legs, breathing hard. She’s nervous and afraid, not nearly drunk enough. Luke’s eyes are glassy and wide, dark, the tip of his tongue right there at the swell of his bottom lip – almost as if the illicit nature of all this has added an extra frisson of much-needed pleasure for him, fried his brain that much more, and none of that, she thinks, is particularly good, save for this highly specific situation of needing his brain to shut down so he’s not brainwashed by an invading alien race. Luke doesn’t say a word. He just watches her. She lets him.

She sits astride him, quickly, refusing to allow any room for doubt; she’s not thinking, she’s not thinking, she doesn’t realize she’s saying that aloud. But she keeps whispering, “Don’t think, don’t think,” for both his benefit and her own.

“I’m not,” he mutters, his mouth too near to her throat, “I’m not,” and then he says: “Fuck me.” She can feel his lips graze her throat and she thinks she says, “oh my god,” but it’s buried beneath him as he says it again: “Fuck me.”

There will be time later, she knows, to feel the full weight of horror at the following: how wet she is, how easy it is to slide down onto him, how he stretches her and how his fingers flex at her hips and how she can’t help but squeeze around him when he knocks his hips upward in one brutal jolt, how he hides his face against her throat. How she can feel his teeth even though he doesn’t bite. Laurel wonders dimly if this was part of this whole bug space invasion, to get everyone without bugs in their heads to act absolutely insane and destroy themselves the same way the bugs would: from the inside out. Luke’s hands are wide on her bare hips, and if that makes her feel anything, that’s not something that ever has to leave his office. The intimacy of it all is overwhelming in a way that makes her feel like her heart is clenched tight in a vise.

His hands drag up from her hips, slow progress that belies forethought. His hands slide up under the hem her tank top, down to the top of her ass, still a polite hesitancy to him that’s probably super noble and admirable ( _thank you, sir, for showing restraint while your sister fucks the bugs from outer space out of your head_ ), and a part of her fears that’s not enough. Thinking, restraint, hesitation in the name of guilt – that’s all a part of logic, of rational left brain logic.

“Don’t think,” she says again. She grinds down harder, earns a groan and a grunt out of him as his own hips reflexively buck up into her. His mouth gapes open at her shoulder, the open sweater damp against his humid mouth. 

“Pull my hair,” she hears him moan, and, fuck, this is going to get that much weirder before it’s over, isn’t it? She does though, her fingers dig in and yank, Laurel trying hard not to make the connection between that and the hungry noises he makes, how much wetter that makes her. She pulls again, Luke’s head tipping back, his eyes closed.

His hands are rough with her now: the greedy grab at her ass, pushing up under her top, wrenching it down, her breasts bare, and she swallows hard around a sound she can’t trust when he starts biting and licking, rocking harder and harder up into her. She keeps trying to tell herself that he could be anyone, but she knows that’s a lie. That she’s responding to him, and that’s a whole new level of panic and bad to add to this mess.

“I want,” he pants, and “What?” she says, and it doesn’t even sound like her. 

Luke manhandles her off of him, stronger than she ever bothered to consider. He bends her roughly over his desk, mindlessly fucking into her, the pace brutal. He feels so much bigger like this, her hands curling in front of her against the edge of the desk, her hips pushing back onto him involuntarily. 

It feels good, it feels good in a way that makes needy sounds trip up and out of her mouth faster than she can bite down on them. Feels good enough to make her feel alien to herself.

She’s spiraling up fast; she starts to come, biting into her forearm, making these embarrassing raw sobbing sounds. And if he had any mind left, this is where he loses it. He starts talking and he doesn’t stop – his hand in her hair pulling her head up, no way to muffle the sounds tearing up her throat. She accidentally starts chanting, “Please, please, please,” at the same time he starts telling her to come on his cock, he wants her to come on his cock, and she does, legs shaking, and it’s the desk and it’s him keeping her upright as he continues to fuck her. She’s oversensitive and sweating, her brain a fuzzed out mess of _oh my god_ and _what have we done_ , but if she can’t think straight, then neither can he, and that was the goal, right? She’s saving the world.

“Oh my god, just come already,” his name like gravel in her mouth when she says it. He groans, almost drowned out by the wet smack of skin on skin, his hips moving faster, rougher. When he does come, he’s holding her down against the desk, against the relentless rhythmless snap of his hips, her own hips painfully knocking into the edge of the desk.

 

 

 

  

After, she shoves him off of her. The bugs skitter noisily across and down the desk and she shudders. Luke is barely conscious, slumped on the floor behind his desk. She watches the bugs rush out underneath the door and she finally exhales. She can’t even look at Luke, makes herself do it all the same. He’s sprawled out, pantless, on the floor. He stirs slightly, struggles to sit up against the wall, scrubs a hand over his face. Laurel acts fast, yanking her pants back on, ignoring the shared wet between her legs, wincing slightly. Luke gingerly pulls his own pants back on; she can hear him breathing way too hard.

She can hear him say her name – “Laurel,” all broken and sharp. She can practically feel the shame radiating off of him. Or maybe that’s her own.

“It’s fine.” She says it too quickly. “You’re fine. They’re gone.” The silence between them is awkward. She wonders if that’s what she’ll come to define everything between them as now: awkward. 

His head is in his hands when he finally says, “Fuck.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Laurel says. “Or never.” She swallows. Her own head hurts. Her hips hurt, her thighs, she’s uncomfortably wet between them. She’s exhausted and she has to get out of here. She thinks she asks him if he wants to go home or come with her or – her voice sounds pathetic and small and she’s talking just to fill the room because otherwise, otherwise, she doesn’t know. Otherwise what’s left in the room is the both of them and what they’ve done.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. He won’t look at her. “I’m gonna – I’m fine. I’m just gonna crash here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Go home, Laurel.” He finally glances up at her and she quickly looks away. “They won’t … come back?”

She wraps her arms around her middle. “I don’t know. They didn’t. For me. But.” She grabs her purse, fishes out a package of earplugs. She had bought an entire case of them at the CVS near her apartment, the clerk eyeing her strangely when Laurel had deposited the whole box of one hundred individually wrapped pairs of earplugs. “Here,” she says, tossing them to Luke. “That should do it.”

 

 

 

 

Laurel keeps the horror at bay until she gets home. She immediately grabs an open bottle of wine and carries it with her to the bathroom. She peels her clothes off, her breath going raggedy and panicky, like she might start to cry. She isn’t going to cry. She wrenches the shower curtain back. She can still smell him on her though, that expensive cologne he wears, woodsy and male. She can smell _him._

She stands under the shower; reaches for the bottle of wine she left on the edge of the sink and drinks under the spray. Tries not to catalog each and every ache and twinge she feels. It’s easier that way. It’s easier, but she still scrubs between her legs, ignores the way that makes her clench around nothing, still keyed up in a way she doesn’t want to think about (doesn’t want to think about Luke under her, how she knows and she’s tested the strength of his thighs, what it feels like to have his hands on her, how she knows what he wants from a woman or at least what he wants when the woman is her, what he feels like in her mouth, she took him in her mouth, he made her come). 

She crawls into her bed under the mosquito netting, puts her phone alarm on vibrate on the pillow next to her. She puts the earplugs in and she pretends to fall asleep. 

 

 

 

 

Laurel gets to the office late the next morning. Spent too long in front of the morning wondering if she looked normal enough, whatever normal enough constitutes in this given situation. 

She runs into the new staff assistant hired immediately after the government had reopened, all but crashing into him when she steps through the door. Laurel still hasn’t learned his name. 

“Where have you been he is _not_ in a good mood I am warning you.” Everything this kid says is three dramatic ideas strung together as one. 

“Oh yeah?” Laurel says, desperately playing it cool while trying to steal a glance into Luke’s office. The blinds are still drawn. She doesn’t know what sort of sign that is.

“I think he slept here last night,” the nameless staff assistant whispers, “the coffeepot was still on this morning when I got here have you ever had bullet coffee I used to love it but that was when I was dating an EDM DJ.”

“What,” is all she says, walking away from him. Walking away from Luke’s office, too.

 

 

 

 

She has to get out of D.C. She has to leave. She wants to leave, but she can’t go, because – because, she’s realizing, there are entirely too many nightmare scenarios she has been presented with that demand the answer to the unholy question, _how, exactly, are you going to live with this?_

So she avoids Luke at first.

When she finally does step into Luke's office, it’s with Rochelle and Gustav in tow. Luke is clearly, painfully, hungover. His shirt is wrinkled even though it’s a different shirt than the one he wore yesterday. Last night. Her hands curling into it, wrinkling it. Christ. There are heavy bags under his eyes, his skin kind of sallow. He hasn’t shaved. He’s pouring whiskey in his coffee when they come in, barely a glance offered their way. “Hair of the dog,” he says.

“That’s promising,” Gustav says, nodding at all three of them. 

Laurel had called Rochelle, told her she needed to talk to her and Gustav. “Something kind of … buggy? Is going on here?” She could hear Gustav in the background hissing that they needed to hang up, the NSA is always listening. 

When they arrived, she told them: Luke was bugged.

“You mean, like his phone? Because I’ve been telling you – ”

“No. I mean, bugs bugged.” A pause comprised of Gustav and Rochelle staring at her expectantly with a whole lot of shared anticipatory dread. “He’s okay now.”

“How … did you? Get rid of them?” The implication had dawned on Rochelle first.

“Oh god,” Laurel said. “It was all … solo work,” she lied.

“Laurel told us what happened,” Rochelle says now, while Gustav waves his phone over and then near him when Luke waves him off.

“What?” Teenage Laurel might’ve been proud for earning that expression on Luke’s face. 

“I commend you for the effective one-handed salute, Senator,” Gustav says, quelling the all-too obvious horror writ across Luke’s face.

“Aren’t most salutes one-handed? Why am I even asking,” Rochelle says. 

 

 

 

 

When Gustav and Rochelle leave, it’s exactly what Laurel has been trying to avoid: it’s just the two of them.

“Talk about the ultimate in pyrrhic victory.” He aims for wry nonchalance by force; it doesn’t work.

“That’s not how you pronounce pyrrhic,” she says. And then, “Are you okay?”

“Am I – ? Fuck. I’m.” He sighs heavily, that weight-of-the-world sigh he’s historically abused but actually applies now. “I’m fine,” he spits out, like somehow that’s offensive to him or should be to her. “Are you,” he casts for a word he never lands, glancing up at her quickly. “Are we – ?”

“We’re fine, Luke.”

“I’m so sorry, I – ” Somehow, this is just as awful as the night before. She can’t deal with how broken and beaten-down he looks.

“Luke. We’re fine. It never happened.”

“Laurel.”

She’s not sure if it has always been the case or if it’s only now, but he says her name wrong.

“It never happened. I have constituents waiting. Your constituents, in fact.”

He says her name like he knows what it sounds like to beg her for something.

 

 

 

 

That afternoon, Laurel can feel Scarlett’s eyes on her. When she turns to face her, Scarlett’s gaze is fixed on the television.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do about these Republicans,” Scarlett says, as much to Laurel as to herself. “They hate women.”

Laurel offers her that half-smile/half- _yikes_ expression that has been getting a major workout since she started working here.

“Did you know in Finland they have a Planned Parenthood on every corner? Like we have Starbucks they have affordable access to women’s health.”

“There’s no way that’s true.”

Scarlett blinks at her. When she stands, it’s like watching incredibly intricate machinery come to life, nothing human or biological about it. Laurel can’t help but take a step back from her. She runs out of steps to take and Scarlett is right there, in front of her.

“Um, hi,” Laurel says nervously.

Scarlett cocks her head to the side. 

“You tried, and that’s admirable. Next time, he’s ours.”

 

 

 

 

Luke’s still hers. He’s still hers even if he doesn’t call her sis anymore.

Three days Luke comes by the apartment and demands she tell him everything. She does, detailing everything that has happened since Dr. Daudier’s head exploded in the back of an ambulance. 

“You’ve been dealing with this alone?” he asks when she’s finished.

That's not what she expected. She had expected more doubt, more arguing, not this. Not shame. She doesn’t really know what to do with the look on his face. But if she’s being fair, she hasn’t known what to do with Luke or his face for a couple days now. It's left her feeling more lonely than she ever could have imagined. That surprises her; they aren’t all that much alike, never have been, but even at their worse, even at their least agreeable or compatible, they had each other’s back. They understood each other. 

“Not alone, not really,” she says. “I’ve had Gustav and Rochelle. Gareth, to a point.”

“But not me.”  


“Luke, come on. I was and am well-aware of how insane this whole thing sounds. Sounded. You believe me now. That’s something.”

“I can’t sleep,” he says suddenly. His eyes meet hers and Laurel doesn’t let herself flinch. Instead, she lets him talk. She listens. He wants to know how she sleeps. He wants to know how she did it before and how she does it now, without worrying they might come back. Without thinking about, and here he stops, circles back to the bugs because even that’s easier to talk about than each other.

His paranoia is another thing that surprises her, but she’s not entirely sure why it would. Luke has always been all about control, about being in charge. Having something so far outside of it, something like that feels like a violation of his very being – she gets it. 

 

 

 

 

She gets it. The days after (The Days After, how she thought of it, capital letters and all), she couldn’t stop feeling them, phantom bugs crawling over her body. Crawling into her ears. Her brain. She had to throw out her Q-tips out of fear she couldn’t control herself, kept prodding them into her ears, trying to get at something she rationally knew (hoped, hoped to god) wasn’t there. But what if they were. What if some got left behind. She stumbled over brief moments of near panic where she asked herself: are these my thoughts? This is me. I’m still real. This is me thinking and talking to myself. This is a different form of madness but it's yours. She ate a giant steak and drank an entire bottle of wine. Danced until she caught herself just swaying and crying in the middle of her empty apartment, a bag of Fritos spilled on the coffee table and the floor. She listened to a fucking Melanesian choir at top volume until her next-door neighbor started banging on their shared wall. She thought about sex. She thought about sex with a studious devotion that had little to do with getting off but rather to remind herself that sex was still a thing she was interested in, and therefore: no bugs in her head. There are no bugs in your head. She’d say it to her reflection in the mirror and she’d say it when she felt a tiny itch in her ear as she forced her hands still at her sides. There are no bugs in your head. You are still you. You are still you. 

So she gets it.

 

 

 

 

“You know,” Luke says as Laurel considers her depleted collection of booze, “what we did can’t be any worse than what the entire Kennedy family did to Rosemary.”

Laurel freezes. Here it is, they're actually going to talk about this, even if under the guise of American history. They’re going to talk about this without flat-out saying, _hey about the fact that we fucked a couple nights ago that’s a terrible thing we should talk about right?_

“Did they gangbang her?” The question’s worth it for the look on Luke’s face, slack-jawed and as much disgusted as impressed with her. She slams the cupboard as she removes two glasses. Thank god Red Wheatus hasn’t tried to reinstitute Prohibition. 

“I just think, you know, lobotomizing and institutionalizing a young woman and, well, hiding her has gotta be just a little worse than what we … ” he trails off, as if he knows a losing argument when he’s mounted one. 

“They’re both circles of hell, Luke.” She unscrews the bottle. “Wait, are you seriously trying to spin your legacy right now? Touching.”

“Our legacy.”

“No, yours.” He accepts the glass when she hands it to him. 

“It’s like Dad said when they busted him for potential election fraud in ’04: if you make it through the first week, no one’s gonna remember it. You get to rewrite the narrative.”

“Dad’s brain has been eaten by bugs.”

“Yeah, well. He said it when he still had an entire brain.”

“You’re rewriting the narrative? With, what? Me as Rosemary Kennedy’s tragic adjunct to your JFK? Or is it Bobby?”

“Give yourself more credit than that,” and he almost sounds like he means it. “And JFK, obviously.”

“Well they both get shot,” she grouses into her glass.

 

 

 

 

That night, they make three mistakes in quick succession. The first is they finish the bottle. 

The second comes at the door to her apartment. They’re both drunk enough to almost be the people they used to be with each other, natural and easy. Like they can both forget that Luke is no longer as affectionate with her, like he doesn’t know what’s appropriate anymore. 

At the door, he kisses her forehead and her entire body tenses up. He must notice – she catches the pained remorseful look on his face when he pulls away that he's not fast enough to conceal.

“I’m sorry,” Laurel says quietly.

“No,” he says. “Don’t be.”

This is the second mistake: Laurel steps forward and she presses her body to his. It’s not a hug and not an embrace if she doesn’t wrap her arms around him. Her hand instead cradles the back of his head and she leans down, hides her face against her shoulder. It dawns on her then, that amongst the myriad sins committed in the name of saving the world, they never kissed. That’s a good thing, she thinks. She thinks it even when she feels his hand, solid and warm and familiar, span the width of her back. Thinks it even when she can feel the flutter of his lips at her temple, his warm breath when he says her name, still wrong in his mouth. 

The third and final mistake is that he asks her if he can stay. 

 

 

 

 

So this is how he does it, how he gets everyone to do what he wants for him. He makes you feel like the bigger person. Like you’re the one performing a noble favor. Or maybe that’s just Laurel being uncharitable, because she knows the ugly truth. Knows that she keeps it tucked away inside of her, as alien and insidious as anything those bugs could have done to her. She wants him to stay, too.

That night at her apartment, he stays the night. They sleep together in her bed in the most literal of terms, under the mosquito netting draped over them. She wants to tell him the mosquito netting reminds her of that time she spent the better part of two months in a glorified tree house down in a rain forest on the Amazon, but she doesn’t. Instead they lay side-by-side in silence. He’s close enough she can smell him, his stale cologne, the fabric softener used on his undershirt. She doesn’t think she’s ever shared a bed with him before. This is another thing she doesn’t say.She can feel him breathing beside her, even and deep, but she knows he’s still awake. Knows that the same way she knows too much about him. The same way she knows: they’re all each other really has. 

“You know Dad’s essentially dead now, right?” she whispers.

“Jesus. Christ, Laurel. Don’t talk to me about Dad when I’m,” he stops abruptly.

“When you’re what?” she drawls, even though that's another thing  she knows. She doesn’t want him to answer.

 

 

 

 

“Knock knock,” Laurel says. 

Monday morning, the coffee cup in her hand empty, the third of the day for her already. Gareth blinks up at her, a genuine look of shock on his face he’s not quick enough to downplay. He looks a lot younger when caught unaware – his face open, free of natural suspicion. 

“To what do I owe the surprise?” he asks. Tension is strung along his shoulders, obvious in his soldier boy posture, the tight stretch of his mouth. 

Laurel shrugs. “I was in the neighborhood.”

He doesn’t say anything to that. Instead, his eyes have narrowed, like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. She can appreciate that. That’s everyday these days: waiting for the next anvil to fall. Anvil, shoes; all mixed metaphors. This town has her speaking in cliches. 

Laurel crosses her arms over her chest, leans against the doorjamb. “Hey,” she says.

He looks up at her, a small grin. He leans back in his chair, relaxes that much. “Hey.”

“I’m sorry,” she says quickly. “I haven’t been avoiding you, I don’t want you to think that, that I’ve been avoiding you. It’s,” and she stops there. “It’s been a really weird week.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

She shakes her head. “Thanks. I just wanted something normal, even if for only five minutes.”

 

 

 

 

The night before, Luke was in her bed.

“Are you going to leave?” he had asked.

She frowned, quick and brief. The sheets rustled as she glanced over at him, her chin bumping against his bare shoulder. She looked back up at the ceiling, declared that safer. “I live here,” she said.

“No. I mean D.C.”

“I live here,” she said, softer this time. And then, she quoted: “This is the way the world ends,” and trailed off into a sharp laugh. Whimper or bang. Both.

Luke sighed noisily, irritated. Almost like they were the same people they had always been.

“Stop being so goddamn dramatic,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> widespindriftgaze @ tumblr


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